Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies

Opportunities for Students

Capstone Project

This requirement is optimally fulfilled by each GSFS major no earlier than the spring term of the third year and preferably in the senior year to assure curricular depth and intellectual and creative growth (“verticality”) in gender, sexuality, and or feminist studies. 

Each major is required to complete an original senior-level research, creative, or artistic project that engages gender, sexuality, and feminism as appropriate to the topic and discipline or disciplines.

The capstone project may be completed in two ways:

  • as the final project in a GSFS 300- or 400-level course or a departmental tutorial or capstone course; or
  • as a GSFS honors project taken in the senior year

Majors must receive approval in advance from the faculty member and the GSFS Committee on Majors and must request to be enrolled in GSFS 400 by the GSFS progrm director. GSFS final projects are expected to:

  • be significantly informed by gender, sexuality, and or feminist theories, methods, and scholarship;
  • be alert to methodological, representational, and epistemological issues within gender, sexuality, and or feminist scholarship;
  • attend to (and complicate, if necessary) issues of identity, positionality, and intersectionality;
  • be interdisciplinary in approach;
  • demonstrate analytical depth, creative or original thinking, clarity and polish in writing, and correct citation/bibliographic style.

The Effective Political Agency project is for students interested in investigating such common complex problems as access to education, health care, and immigration and refugee displacement. Students will examine a world problem that is present in their home country and explore alternatives to address the problem.

Students will be introduced to the multiple dimensions of problem-solving, analysis, and methodology on how to proceed with the problem of interest. Students will be divided into teams based on the world problems that receive the most interest from winter-term applicants.

While students will work individually on their project, the opportunity to work in a team will allow students to share their findings with peers that are investigating the same problem in different countries, and thus exchange findings and strategies that succeeded and failed.

Project Goals

Students who take advantage of this learning opportunity will:

  1. Conduct in-depth research on a world problem of interest   
  2. Consult with team members on the impact of historical, cultural, societal, political, economic, international influences, and ideological dominations that are shaping the problem.
  3. Demonstrate communication skills, including oral and written discussion of research available on the topic
  4. Create an effective plan with an alternative solution on how to address the problem, that demonstrates an understanding of a principled problem-solving approach.

For more information regarding this, please contact our office by email, gsfs@oberlin.edu.